NOTE: These videos were prepared when the Census at School Project was managed by Statistics Canada. Most of the information is still relevant.
Duration: 5:27 min.
Description:
This episode will show you how to access your class results after the students have completed the on-line survey.
To access the Rich-Text Format (RTF) version, use the document conversion features available in most word processing software, or use a file viewer capable of reading RTF.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Angela McCanny and I’m a resource teacher for Statistics Canada. I’ve helped many teachers get started with using their Census at School classroom dataset for interesting activities in the classroom.
This episode will show you how to access your class results after all your students have completed the online survey. To see the results, you must be logged in as a teacher.
So let’s begin by going to the Census at School website, www.censusatschool.ca, click on Teachers and we’ll log-in onto the Teacher sign-in page. Click Teacher sign-in and use the email address you used to register, and your teacher password.
Scroll down to Your registered classes and click on Results for the class you want to see. To see the actual results, click View. Now we are looking at the table of results for your class. If we scroll to the right, we see the answers for all the questions in the survey. Now, if we scroll down, we can see all the students. Students like to find themselves in the class dataset. They can identify themselves using unique information such as their birth date, eye colour and left or right handedness.
If you are in a lab with a computer projector, you and your students can watch the results come in as each student completes the survey and clicks Submit. Simply log in as a teacher, click Results and click the “refresh” button periodically. You will be able to see how many students have completed the survey so far.
If you wish to see the results being added to the dataset, click View, and again, click the refresh button periodically. You will see additional rows of student results added to the dataset as each student clicks Submit.
These results will be here for the entire school year and you can access them at any time. Once the next school year starts, they will be archived at the top of the page where you can continue to access them. Your new classes in the new school year will be added under the Registered classes section as you enroll them.
It is important to realize that only teachers can view the class results online. You can show them to the students using a computer projector, but if you would like the students to be able to work with them on their own computer screen, you will need to download the results into a program that your school has for working with data. This could be a spreadsheet program, like Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc, Apple Works or some other similar program. Or perhaps you have access to a dynamic statistical software program like Autograph or the Key Curriculum Press products, TinkerPlots or Fathom.
If your school has Microsoft Excel, perhaps the easiest way to download and save the data for your students is to click View or download in Microsoft Excel format.
Click Save, and in the Save in box, select your school’s shared drive. This is a location where you can save files that your students can access from their student log-in. If you haven’t used the school’s shared drive before, ask the local IT person in your school for assistance about where to save the data.
Remember to rename the file, so that you will recognize it.
Also, in the Save as type box, select the Microsoft Excel format, rather than leaving it as a .CSV document.
One word of caution: I have found that this process doesn’t always work in schools that have Microsoft Excel, and you may need to follow this next set of instructions to download the data instead. So, if the download into Excel didn’t work or you are using a different spreadsheet or statistical software program, you’ll need to save the data first as a .CSV file, and then import it into the other software later.
So, let’s return to the Results page and this time click Download. Do not select Open or Find, if those buttons are available. Click Save. In the Save in box, save it to a convenient location on your computer, where you will be able to find it for importing to other software. The desktop or your teacher folder would be fine.
In the File name box, rename it so you will recognize it later. In Save as type box, leave it as a .CSV document. Click Save.
Now the file is ready to be imported into whichever software you would like to use with your students.
Another option that may be useful, especially if computer access is limited in your school, is to save the data to a spreadsheet program and then print out whichever columns of data will be useful for your students’ activities.
One final idea, that some teachers find useful, is changing the class password in order to protect the dataset. You can change the class password by going back to the Welcome page and clicking on Class ID number. On the Edit a class page, change the password and click Modify. No one will be able to add additional completed surveys to the class dataset unless you first provide them with the new password.
You are now ready to use the class data with your students. There are many lesson ideas on the Census at School website for Grades 4 and up. And I’m sure you will have many ideas of your own about how you would like to use your class data.
Let the exploration begin!
